Vitaliy Musiyenko racks up for a first ascent on the East Face of Mount Whitney. Photo by Austin Siadak
The Many Faces of Mount Whitney
With upward of 30,000 visitors a year, tackling the highest peak in the Lower 48 means a different kind of wilderness experience
In the off-season, when the place is nearly empty, it’s freakishly quiet a mile and a half into California’s Mount Whitney Zone, the perimeter that separates the Lower 48’s tallest peak from the surrounding wilderness. The Zone is not a geographic place so much as a muddled ecology of the mind, an aura, a strange attractor. A vortex. When perfectly reasonable people visit here—and they do so in uncounted hordes—they often become anything but.
Suddenly there’s a tug on the rope attached to my waist and a faraway summons. I’m on belay, apparently. My protector is Peter Mayfield, an environmental educator from Tahoe who often invokes John Muir, the namesake for both the wilderness we’re in and the trail on the opposite side of the peak. At present, we’re the only Zone occupants in sight. Just two of us stair-stepping our way up Whitney’s East Face. It’s mid-autumn. A brisk wind blows from the north. Iceberg Lake, now frozen over, occasionally
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